DeHuff: why Sandy Hook will stay with me forever

At first, I grappled with whether or not to document my trip to Newtown.

Do your job, let the families grieve in peace, and stop perpetuating the hailstorm-media-feeding-frenzy that has plagued Newtown for the last two weeks.

That was the logical, pragmatic side of my brain. The other side – the eccentric, inquisitive side – told me to write it down, because I’ll forget, and this one I didn’t want to forget.

When I arrived at my hotel, just a few highway miles away from Sandy Hook, it seemed the attitude among my new colleagues for the next three days was to buckle down, get the scoop, look for new angles – new story ideas. I jumped right in.

By day three, it seemed all the “good” stories had already been written. I use the term “good,” loosely, as none of this was good. But what my colleagues were trying to do was to tell stories of inspiration, love, compassion and sacrifice, that drew complete strangers from as far as Ottawa, Canada to Newtown.

Julian Revie, a composer and concert pianist from Ottowa, played carols on Christmas Day. This was just one example of the outpouring of support that converged on Sandy Hook.

My first assignment was to cover a funeral.

Rachael D’Avino, a behavioral health therapist, was one year younger than me – 29 – when she was shot and killed by Adam Lanza inside Sandy Hook Elementary School.

I had heard that just days before her death, her boyfriend asked her parents for permission to have their daughter’s hand in marriage. He never got the chance to ask Rachael.

I donned my thickest skin and went to the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem. I knew it wasn’t going to be easy.

Heavy rains battered everything as black-cloaked mourners languidly entered the church. When I got inside, it was standing room-only. Church officials even opened up an adjacent room, where people could watch the Mass of Christian Burial on closed-circuit TV.

In the past, my editors have had to tell me to quit it with the adjectives – stick to the facts. Loving fiction writing and words, my vocabulist self has always struggled with this. But that day, I had no doubt. I knew the right thing to do – honor Rachael with this article and do not exploit. Whatever you do, do not exploit. Do not sensationalize, I told myself.

I hope I honored Rachael with my article and told a story that celebrated her life. I knew the family, (as pretty much every family member of the victims) was sick of the nonstop press persistence in Newtown. After all, enough damage had already been done. Who was I to crash a funeral and write about someone I never met? In fact, how dare I?

Two days after Christmas, one of our sister newspapers published a full-page photo of an angel ornament hanging from one of the Christmas tree memorials. The headline read one, simple word, “Peace.”

Walking into “the” intersection at Sandy Hook, just a few yards from the school, for all the sadness and grief that was unavoidable – the kind that made you want to bury your head in the sand and wish it all away – there was also a sense of peace there. There was not one trace of Adam Lanza, the man, the boy, the coward, who was.

Rather, an incredible, astounding and overwhelming showing of support from people far and wide was everywhere the eye could see.

Christmas trees for each child and adult, decorated with each one’s personal effects and belongings, line the streets. Crosses and candles are remembrances of lives full of light. Banners adorn buildings, flags fly at half-mast and thousands of emails and letters have been sent from around the world.

After my time there, one of the editors sent those of us who went to Newtown an email. “From the bottom of my heart, thank you all for coming to help us cover this horrible story.”

Well put, I thought. It was a horrible story, but an important one, at that.

The editor encouraged us to write about it, as the theory was it would help us process and cope with what we saw and experienced.

At the end of each day, I sat at my hotel bar in front of a glass of whiskey and tried to decompress. Hell, I had it easy. Some reporters were covering two, three funerals a day, and ones held for little children. It could drive anyone to drink, or worse.

My growing fear was that Sandy Hook was becoming somewhat of a tourist attraction. I had never seen memorials like that before in my life, except for 9/11.

The traffic going in was maddening – and quite obvious as to why so many cars were headed in the same direction. This made me angry. Then again, I was one of those cars stuck in traffic. I was no better because I am a reporter. I was part of the problem.

Ultimately, I give these people the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps they weren’t going to Sandy Hook to gawk. Perhaps they were going to pay their respects, as I do now, did then, and forever will do.